In an electronic commerce (e-commerce) session, a buyer places orders with a supplier in accordance with a trading agreement. In an e-commerce session, the trading agreement includes terms and conditions that describe specifications for, or limitations on, the business processes that are available to the buyer during the e-commerce session. The business logic of the e-commerce session is governed by the defined set of terms and conditions for the buyer and the supplier for that e-commerce session. Different terms and conditions may apply at different times and for different buyers.
In some situations, it is inefficient to require that the entire set of terms and conditions are specified in a single, uniquely defined, trading agreement for each buyer/supplier interaction. Certain common terms and conditions may be defined for multiple trading agreements. For example, IBM Corporation markets WebSphere Commerce™, which is an electronic commerce system in which a contract may reference another trading agreement (known as a business account) that is defined to be common for a defined buyer organization. Such inclusion by reference allows a “business account” to specify terms and conditions for an entire buyer organization, while a specific trading agreement specifies the terms and conditions for the e-commerce transaction between the individual buyers in that organization and the supplier. In this type of e-commerce system, a buyer organization is expected to have a single business account but many contracts are expected to reference the same business account.
Such an approach, however, may require duplication among the terms and conditions for various organizations. For example, hosted stores in a single e-commerce system may all be governed by a single set of terms and conditions, called a “hosting contract,” that must be respected by all trading agreements used by all stores hosted by the e-commerce system. In such a case, each separate business account will contain the same terms and conditions reflecting the hosting contract. Where such hosting contract terms and conditions are modified, each business account for hosted stores will require appropriate alterations.
In e-commerce systems, the management of trading agreements may also become fragmented. Typically, a single trading agreement is structured as a single object. However, it is also common for different users to specify different sets of terms and conditions within that single object. It is potentially unwieldy to allow different participants to edit different subsets of the terms and conditions in the object that defines a trading agreement.
For example, a contract trading agreement typically includes terms and conditions to specify a set of available products and prices covered by the contract. A buyer may wish to further restrict the set of products, and may also seek to restrict the set of permitted payment methods or ship-to addresses. Placing the latter terms and conditions in the contract typically requires involvement of a contract administrator to include the terms in the trading agreement and to manage any modifications as the buyer's needs change. Given a large number of contracts, the contract administrators are required to carry out significant amounts of updating of individual trading agreements.
A further issue arises when an organization setting up an e-commerce web site does not wish to create the entire set of required terms and conditions for each customer. The business model of the organization may require only a limited set of “template” contracts. In such a situation, the definition of a set of terms and conditions for each customer will not be as efficient as asserting that the customer is to be associated with one of a set of template terms and conditions, as modified by some small set of changes to the terms and conditions.
Such templates are disclosed in Patent Cooperation Treaty Patent Application Publication Number WO 00/70484, published Nov. 23, 2000, entitled “A Market Operating System,” naming Christopher Jens Cook as inventor. In the Cook reference, a buyer and a seller are able to complete an agreement. The seller is able to access a template for an agreement based on the trade options that the seller specifies. For a given template, the seller will specify the terms that apply for the particular transaction, either by providing the information manually or by selecting from stored options. Such an approach, although utilizing templates to permit reuse of terms, requires the seller to construct a specific agreement for each transaction by selecting from options provided. The Cook reference system therefore requires input by the seller for each transaction.
It is therefore desirable to provide an e-commerce system that permits a flexible and automated definition of terms and conditions for trading agreements that are to govern e-commerce sessions.